NAVER Cloud for AI
Enjoy customized artificial intelligence solutions by using CLOVA AI’s own technology and engine
from BTS concert
to vaccine appointments
In all corners
of your life
NAVER Cloud everywhere
Back in 2019, global pop music sensation BTS had its biggest tour to date at the Wimbley Stadium in London, United Kingdom. The septet performed during the Love Yourself World Tour, which was globally streamed on NAVER’s V Live platform.
More than 140,000 people from the United States, Japan, Korea and more were able to watch the performance in real time, thanks to the tech giant’s new venture – NAVER Cloud.
Thanks to NAVER Cloud’s ten footholds throughout the world, music fans could watch the performance seamlessly.
NAVER Cloud has also assisted the Korean government cope with the on-going Covid-19 pandemic. Back in July 2021, the vaccine appointment reservation page of Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) was down due to the surge in the number of visitors jonesing to receive the jab.
The NAVER subsidiary has worked with other tech giants like Kakao Corp. and LG Corp.'s subsidiary LG CNS, as well as the relatively newer Bespin Global to completely overhaul the appointment website. With the change, 12 million people can now access the website simultaneously.
Following the revamp, Seoul selected NAVER Cloud as its choice of Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) for vaccine appointments.
Building on two decades of experience & know-how
Founded in 1999, NAVER Corp. is a household name in Korea. The conglomerate is best known for its namesake search engine, which many affectionately call “the green window” because of the color of its search bar.
Supported by the strong technological foundation, the parent company provides nearly all possible services available on the web – be it search platform, e-commerce, fintech, content, or cloud. Not only that, it beats its competitors in almost all of the mentioned areas.
On the back of such success, NAVER Cloud Platform was launched in 2017. Its rapid growth since then can be attributed to the parent company’s over 20 years of experience and know-how in the already crowded industry. It prides itself as being as competitive as its US counterparts such as Amazon Web Services, MS Azure, and Google Cloud.
Double-digit annual revenue growth
NAVER Cloud began with just 22 products back in 2017. It now boasts 203 products in 18 categories.
At present, more than 60,000 companies in the country are NAVER Cloud clients. Its clientele include more than 55% of Korea’s top 100 firms, such as Samsung Electronics Co., SK Telecom Co., and online game developer PUBG Corp.; as well as live streaming platforms like AfreecaTV Co. and e-commerce firms.
In 2020, NAVER Cloud reached a total revenue of 273.7 billion won ($232 million,) a whopping 41% increase from the year prior. The jump in revenue is much higher than the global (29.3%) or domestic (18.7%) average in the public cloud market. The company expects this trend to have continued through the end of 2021.
Unit: Bn KRW
To keep the momentum going, the company plans to invest 80% of its revenue to technology and data center by 2023. In 2022, it plans to complete the construction of its second data center dubbed GAK Sejong in Korea’s de facto administrative capital of Sejong. The new building will sprawl across 293,697 square meters, making it Asia’s biggest hyperscale data center and six times bigger than the first data center. In it, the company plans to install more than 100,000 servers.
NAVER’s first data center, GAK Chuncheon, is located in the capital city of Gangwon Province. The name “GAK” comes from a structure at Haeinsa, a head temple of the Jogye Order of Korean Seon Buddhism in South Gyeongsang Province. Since 1398 it has been home to Tripitaka Koreana, the whole of the Buddhist Scriptures carved onto 81,350 wooden printing blocks. NAVER Cloud aspires to safely store and host its clients' data like the temple has for the National Treasure.
Aerial and inside view of GAK Chuncheon, the data center
Korea's only cloud platform with source technology
NAVER Cloud prides itself to be on par with its global competitors; mainly on the strength of its source technology and high level of security.
Its selling point is the diverse product portfolio that provides solutions to most possible scenarios in adopting cloud into management systems. NAVER Cloud provides IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and hybrid clouds.
NAVER Cloud is the only provider in Korea that develops and provides PaaS solutions based on its source technology.
Infrastructure as a Service
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is one of the three main categories of cloud computing services – and currently NAVER Cloud’s bread and butter.
IaaS is the most basic level of cloud computing service. In it, the user borrows the provider’s infrastructure; usually networking hardware, storage, and servers, through the Internet.
Going forward, however, the company is slated to focus its efforts on more sophisticated cloud computing services.
Platform as a Service
NAVER Cloud provides a variety of Platform as a Service (PaaS) products. For PaaS, the cloud provider offers everything that an IaaS provides; plus the operating system, database management systems, and other features.
These tools are usually needed for application development.
Jang Bum-sik, the lead developer of NAVER Cloud Platform’s PaaS said, “As cloud adoption has become the norm, the main reasons for choosing a specific platform have come down to: How advanced PaaS is and whether the provider has native environment for hosting.”
Jang added, “Instead of using open source technology, we are expanding our service portfolio by applying services developed within NAVER. We can provide customized solutions based on the clients’ industry- and objective-specific needs.”
The cloud subsidiary has been focusing more on data analytics platforms by using the parent company’s data; and released Cloud Data Box and Data Forest, two products that encompass both data analytics and artificial intelligence to provide business insights.
Software as a Service
Software as a Service (SaaS) is the complete package of a web application program. A SaaS provider manages all system layers ranging from hardware, network, data, to applications; minimizing the areas in which a client has to be hands-on.
Many are familiar with SaaS programs that provide the whole gamut of office solutions from email to online storage and calendars.
Scroll down for in-depth information on NAVER’s main SaaS products, namely NAVER WORKS and NAVER WORKPLACE.
The most widely-used business messenger in Japan
NAVER WORKS is the company’s representative SaaS product. As an all-in-one collaboration tool that covers various functions that caters to remote working and can live on mobile and PCs alike. Other SaaS products include NAVER WORKPLACE, a cloud-based smart enterprise information system and NAVER WORKBOX, a secure and convenient cloud file sharing service.
LINE WORKS, the Japanese-language version of NAVER WORKS, has been the archipelago’s number one ranked business messenger for five years in a row, according to a study by Fuji Chimera Research Institute, Inc.
It is similar to and compatible with LINE, a messenger app with 188 million monthly active users globally. Especially with the work-from-home requirements during the pandemic, more users have installed the business chatting app than ever before in a given period.
The Japan-based research Institute expects new users of LINE WORKS to have increased by 50% in 2021.
Around the globe, there are some 300,000 companies that use NAVER WORKS and LINE WORKS; two identical products only differing in the languages it provides. That is more than a twofold increase from last year’s around 100,000 corporate clients.
Going forward, NAVER WORKS plans to also develop tools to accommodate on-site duties for work outside of the main workplaces. By incorporating artificial intelligence onto the messaging platform, the company plans to support interoperability with third party solutions.
What makes NAVER Cloud stand out
What makes NAVER Cloud stand out among its competitors is its homegrown artificial intelligence solution CLOVA; especially its latest AI dubbed HyperCLOVA.
Launched in May 2021, HyperCLOVA is Korea’s biggest scale AI yet. It boasts a higher parameter of 204 billion than San Francisco-based OpenAI’s GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters. The higher the parameter, a key to machine learning algorithms, the more problems an AI can solve.
Online shopping is an area in which NAVER has successfully incorporated HyperCLOVA.
FOR YOU and CLOVA MD are both examples of a service encompassing the newly launched HyperCLOVA. The former curates items to show to shoppers and the latter works as merchandising director from setting a theme to selecting products for the best shopping experience.
More Korean data leads to accurate results
Korea’s largest credit card company Samsung Card Co, Ltd. is using CLOVA Chatbot and API Gateway in its online community’s customer service. A prominent example is Azinangi, a community where users not only share information about caring for pets but also seek medical consultation with veterinarians.
NAVER Corp. being a homegrown company and having the data in the Korean language is a plus for gathering text and spoken corpus that the AI can learn from.
Based on Samsung Card’s independent testing, NAVER Cloud Platform’s CLOVA Speech Recognition (CSR) had high accuracy in interpreting sounds to extract text.
Certified advanced security
NAVER Cloud boasts the most number of security certifications among domestic cloud solutions providers.
In July 2021, it even received Singapore’s MTCS (Multi-Tier Cloud Security) certification as the first Korean company to do so. As Singapore is known for tight regulations on security regarding the public, finance, and medical sector, the breakthrough gave the company the confidence it needed to explore beyond the peninsula.
Vertical solutions tailored to each client
NAVER Cloud offers vertical solutions unique to each sector of business for a specified duration, utilizing the experience of the parent company’s existing services. You can think of it as a package deal of different products tailored to a specific industry’s needs.
NAVER Cloud for Hybrid
Get the best of both worlds. Minimize changes to the on-premise system while utilizing cloud management
NAVER Cloud for Finance
Secure infrastructure for financial institutions and fintech firms
NAVER Cloud for Smartwork
Collaboration tools, corporate information system and file sharing in one for B2B clients
NAVER Cloud for Game
Reduce development resources for game but expand services within the game platform
Media, customer services, education, commerce, and medical solutions will be available in the near future.
Aggressive expansion beyond Korea
NAVER Cloud is aggressively pursuing the overseas market with some ten footholds beyond the peninsula. It added Europe’s World Customs Organization and the biggest SaaS firm in Southeast Asia named Deskera to its clientele list.
Kim Tae-Chang, the executive director of Naver Cloud said he projects NAVER Cloud to become the second biggest player in the domestic market and the third biggest player in Japan and Southeast Asia through aggressive investments.
NAVER Cloud Platform is available worldwide via centrally located regional centers. There are infrastructure footprints in 10 key locations; namely Korea, Japan, Singapore, U.S. (East Coast and West Coast,) Germany, Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
Despite the fact that the centers are spread out throughout the globe, private communications are always on-going through dedicated lines among global regions.
As if that is not comprehensive enough, NAVER says it is continually expanding its cloud service coverage. As more of our activities move onto the digital space, its influence is sure to grow on hyperspeed.
Written by Chang-Jae Yoo yoocool@hankyung.com; Edited by Jee Abbey Lee; Designed by Jerry Lee; Video edited by In-Byeol Kim